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Colonial American Cooking Tools

For those of you that homestead or are thinking about homesteading, I thought I would share some tools that early Americans used in every day cooking. It might give you some ideas to incorporate into your life style.

fire spoon - A fire spoon is a long handled tool similar to a fireplace shovel used to carry hot coals from place to place. It might be from the fireplace to start an oven or from home to home if your fire went out.

It was made from the stump of a tree (ideally, white oak or pine) burned hollow, scraped clean and polished. You aimed to make your hollow an inverted conical shape -- the fire could be guided by holes drilled in the stump.

Ideally, the tree stump would have a healthy sapling tree nearby, or a tree branch.

If so, you'd tie a block of white oak to the sapling or branch. Otherwise, you'd make a sweep coming off a post and hang the pounder off that.

You worked the device like a piston, with whatever you'd hung the pounder on acting as a spring to lift it back up for you to ease the work. Still, it could take half a day to grind up half a bushel of corn into cornmeal.

SOURCE: practicallyedible.com

Fireplace crane - A device that spans the width of the fireplace on which pots can be hung. These generally will rotate out of the fireplace so you can add, remove or stir a pot without having your hands over the fire.

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grate jack - used to sit pots on over the fire when a crane is not used.

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Last edited by Rick; 02-23-2008 at 02:28 PM.
Reason: added link to spider

Probably the handiest device all. The thingys hanging on the crane that support the pots are called trammels. There are several different kinds that can be used depending on the type of crane. Notice the end of the crane has a bit of upward flare to keep trammels from sliding off the end.

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice - Grey's Law.
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